In a front-page article in L’Osservatore Romano, Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti of Perugia-Città della Pieve said that Pope Francis’s new encyclical on care for our common home is comparable …
Yes but somehow I don’t think that Pope Benedict XV’s 1921 encyclical In Praeclara Summorum on the poet Dante Alighieri, despite its beauty, ranks in any way equivalent to say Blessed Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae on birth control.
In a front-page article in L’Osservatore Romano, Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti of Perugia-Città della Pieve said that Pope Francis’s new encyclical on care for our common home is comparable …
Both the environment and employees can too easily be seen as just a commodity to be exploited by those of us with the means to do so. In this, I see that these two encyclicals are indeed comparable and especially important because they challenge us in ways that some other encyclicals do not. An encyclical that defines dogma, for instance, might not have a great impact on how we actually live our lives, but these two both address the strong potential for greed and a lack of concern for others and the future that can creep into our everyday lives and ways of doing business. Perhaps this is why these two in particular are fodder for much debate, as we try to justify our actions in light of their message.
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